The Ultimate Gaming Minivan - Part 1

dad are we there yet that is something I've heard far too many times now most parents would just Chuck a couple of iPads into the back of the car and call it a day but I guess I shouldn't be surprised that growing up with Mr Tech tips himself as a dad has given my kids a slightly different perspective on what a good gaming experience is so it's pretty safe to say that cut the rope ain't gonna cut it but when ecoflow reached out oh about sponsoring a video to show off their power kits which can add full 120 volt power and a massive battery Bank to your vehicle I finally had the opportunity to make a video that I have wanted to make for about five years kidding out my van with the ultimate gaming setup except in order to achieve a suitable level of wife approval factor it's going to take a little more work than just duct taping monitors to the backs of the seats and seat belting in a test bench we're going to do this thing right or well Jake's involved so at least right enough foreign [Music] look at all these goodies truthfully I'm coming in kind of cold here so I'll be learning what's going on along with you guys um what Eco flow ended up oh my God look at this thing do you want me to move the Box sending over is there four kilowatt hour power kit specifically the independence kit version which you can think of as having all the Fixins for more permanent setups so the batteries and the Hub are part of the base get set kit while the prepared kit adds a distribution panel this down here whoa wow this is part of the prepared kit which adds this fused distribution panel it's got Breakers this is for like motorhomes this is not for oh really yes so this is not for minivans to you could put it in a shed too that won't stop us then they sent the independence kit which adds a console on top of that so you've got this touch screen at the front where you can control your power thing your kids are being too loud boom no power how's your games now but they'd still have the batteries oh yeah they'd still have oh no he's shutting off the output yeah no I can shut it off I can shut it off look at these bats batteries what the hell are these lithium or lead acid lithium iron phosphate shut up this has got to be so much freaking power two kilowatt hours and there's solar panels and solar panel cables oh and cables none of this stuff is unique to ecoflow normally you would buy all these parts separately from different manufacturers and kind of piece the system together yourself but what we like about this is that it should be basically Plug and Play giving us a ton of capability so one it gives us a bunch of AC power for even high performance gaming PCs in the back two it allows us to run all of that stuff without the engine running and three it allows us to charge up our batteries Off the Grid so we can game while we're on a freaking camping trip it's pretty sick did I mention this is almost the same amount of battery backup we have on our ups like for the server yeah it's a lot of battery yeah yeah I really do wait you want to take this apart it's super simple why do you want to take it apart show what's inside it's neat what about our warranty yeah that's one of those this is pre-production it's going back to them anyway it doesn't matter well that's not very fun to disassemble no it's because you're not done yet there's screws there's one over there and then I put two in over here and the rest are on the table because I wanted to be fast hey did you know that we have a screwdriver what ltdstore.com for whom goes that dynamite oh my God I don't think we should be touching this don't touch it oh my God look at this heatsink that is terrifying no wonder this thing has four cooling fans at the back of it look at the like the the size of those contacts that's a lot of power there's lots of Silastic which is good so the vibrations of a vehicle aren't going to cause any of the solder joints to break which is pretty important for something like this that's meant to go in a car I'm just already seeing how amazing this is gonna be compared to trying to piece something out your yourself I have no idea how how much effort that would take but I imagine it's a lot three of us screwdrivering at the same time I don't have a screwdriver I think the board you're looking for is screwing I'm just gonna start plugging things in all right bro what not what why not because we're gonna do it in the car well why not do it outside of the car Jake are you plugging things in while we haven't even finished putting it back together yet yeah whatever what's the worst that could happen you get shot actually lots of things are you powering it on right now it's not working so I tried I'll unplug it just versus safety okay it has a really gnarly connector you're not supposed to come out that's what you get Jake oh there we go but while it's not really designed to be constantly plugged and unplugged it was a requirement for the project for me that it could be removed if it needed to be that is where this guy comes in basically it's a piece of plywood with some carpet over top of it that has the included mounts for the batteries as well as the Hub all bolted to it so that they're not flying around in the cabin but in the event that we want to remove the whole power setup because you know my kids lost their gaming privileges or something like that it's a matter of taking two strapping young men look I'm already holding the battery okay okay fine two strapping young men you'll have to imagine the other one and lifting the whole thing out of the car uh it's a little bit easier to assemble the whole setup first and then lower it into the van though so uh Jake do you want to maybe put that battery down at some point yeah it's it's not heavy don't worry the Hub is a huge part of what makes the power kit so easy to configure this one piece in places what would probably be five pieces in a DIY kit two solar charge controllers a DC to DC battery charger a DC to DC converter and then a sine wave inverter charger all right there uh do you have those screws to screw it to the screw thing buddy okay no no but I meant buddy this I didn't use sorry no that would be a very rude way for me to ask for sure hey buddy would you get it together wait hold on we should probably scrap hey buddy that's kind of a rude way to address me yeah buddy we should strap these batteries on first I feel like you're probably feeling the right feels these are for the um AC out and DC out that go to the distribution panel yeah so we're gonna wait but we're not using the distribution panel for our configuration but I still wanted to leave them just in case and we also want the extra room for the console wire the distribution panel is great if you want to have individually breakered zones coming off of your power hub we don't really need that because everything that we're running can be handled by a single 20 amp outlet which is right here it's cool that it's 20 amp eh yeah that's really nice it's a lot of juice these straps are nice hey very nice look at this I'm gonna take off this thing yes react to my straps damn it look at that you're a I told you you're a strapping young man great that's what I've always wanted to hear do we have a rough runtime estimate for this with like a couple of gaming PCs on it I can do the math for you right now four kilowatt hours is 4 000 Watts for an hour or a thousand Watts for four hours so let's say probably like six plus hours then well I mean how much power are you gonna draw a gaming computer you don't need something crazy I don't know we're not going to go our TX 490s on these things yeah so ours is the answer plus if you're driving we can charge off the alternator of the car right and solar panels on the roof which we haven't even gotten to yet oh we'll get to that are we supposed to hold it from these from the batteries from the oh that makes sense oh yeah wow yeah it's super simple what the F this is so nice yeah it's actually kind of manageable I mean kind of oh yeah oh fits like a glove oh yeah here look at this Jake what are you doing I'm gonna see it turn on hello what's your problem maybe it's dead oh there 58 look at that you can fit so much percent in this bad boy uh okay are these directional no nope all right cool so I would probably plug the thing that says bat two into the thing where the label would be useful I'm glad I labeled everything what was the point of labeling everything when we were just gonna willy-nilly plug things in see look I plugged it in the right way I mean we've got the batteries on the wrong sides though what do you mean that one that one going all over this side just like whoa look hey it's fired up yes it does that do we plug the screen in now yeah where does this plug in that goes all the way in the front seat well it will but I mean we don't need it right now or you can use a smartphone app there's a smartphone app oh I don't want that thing yeah I thought you might yeah but the kids they could learn they could cut the wire no they won't figure that out and you know the trouble at the end yeah exactly besides it's just a Cat5e cable so like I could easily replace it that's true and if they do that you still have the smartphone app yeah got them it literally is just an ethernet cable nice oh what are we looking at doing things oh just kicked on eco flow well do you feel like the Eco is flowing through you I do holy crap 99 days of battery okay we have no load on it right now just the power LEDs on the unit itself but 99 days wow wow wait did we look at that led for so many days wow look at that so it shows you the individual battery percentages their current discharge rate which is very low obviously yeah battery heating charge level oh sick you can set the max charge level that would be to extend the overall lifespan of your battery at the cost of some of the individual charge capacity you'll typically see that on anything from cell phones to battery Banks to electric vehicles actually it's kind of like over it's kind of like over it's kind of like over perfect why can't I say the words kind of like over provisioning on an SSD there you go you can also set a minimum at like 30 so the batteries won't go below that level which is also super charged and two not charged is bad for them you can also just use it as like a safety yeah yeah okay so it's definitely going to want to just just talking about that we didn't need that for any further shots I'm sure look I'm trying to Cable manage here okay geez I don't know I was kind of thinking like like here or something or like oh it looks kind of janky doesn't it yeah it's pretty big actually can you do it the other way no not really um I'm kind of leaning towards the app all of a sudden having a little change of heart here yeah hmm um oh yeah oh yeah right there bud heads up display baby right I guess this is the point where we talk about how to actually charge the batteries it's plugged into the car okay Jake already mentioned that you can charge it off your alternator but obviously that's not the kind of thing where there's just a plug in the you know under the hood of your car that you plug this thing into yeah what did you guys do because whatever they did my lights flicker now we are going to be installing the alternator kit for the Eco flow you can see it's just two lines positive negative we just gotta hook them up to the alternator we can run this wire all the way through the firewall there's already a gasket there that will just have to make a little cut we're going to run it under the carpet and molding all the way to the back we'll make sure this we have enough slack so we can actually hook this into the ecoflow module where we're going to mount it in the back we're not sure exactly how that's gonna happen but it'll be nice secure and then whatever Linus wants to do with it he gets to do with it tell me what looks uh different about your engine bay yes is it the fact that it says LTT right there that's throwing you off that is a bit of a hint yep now in order to charge a get up like this you wouldn't really want to plug into a cigarette lighter that would only give you like 150 watts of power that's not enough instead we're hooking up directly to the alternator like the part that charges the battery in your car by default alternators in most cars are going to have a little bit of Headroom so on the Hub you can actually configure how much power it'll draw but I think in part two we're going to put a beefier alternator in here so we can like charge it 100 amps or something crazy like that a super beefy alternator the stock one will do 130 at Peak load the one that we're getting we'll do 125 at idle 250 Max it's huge but it's really simple it's literally just two wires you have a positive that you slap onto the alternator positive and a negative that you just got to put to a ground point which we've done kind of right here wait did my van have a roof rack before it didn't we're going to use those to mount the solar panels which are over there wait the solar panels are like just going on like permanently yeah I just assumed that would be more of like a camping thing like you you pull up and then you just kind of sit them out behind the van I mean you could do that but wouldn't you rather just have them on all the time so this thing will charge while we're driving down the highway well it'll charge driving down the highway from the alternator it'll charge when you're at your camping spot not doing anything from the solar panels will it take solar and alternator power at the same time and AC power so if you're at a campsite that had an AC power plug you could go AC power alternator power and solar panel all at the same time burn all the fuel the only limitation is that it'll only do 100 amps at one time oh no only 100 amps at a time good Heavens whatever will I do why don't we try the alternator thing oh you want to charge it with the car yeah let's see what happens I thought you have to be like at speed for the alternator to really like charge stuff okay so the cool thing about the ecoflow thing is you can tell it whether or not to charge at idle oh so you can say no don't charge it idle and when your car is just sitting there and it's not even on it's not going to pull power from your battery Oh okay that's cool we can just turn that off and just watch it pull some power from your battery or you can just start the car yeah I don't want to just start the car start the car you're kind of in an enclosed space station airflow all right all right all right okay you ready starter up so head back here go to input and we'll turn alternator on Wow 17 whole watts and we'll say uh alternator input current oh my God we'll give her let's give her 30 amps oh there you go again 200 Watts charge now give it a little rev that's definitely going to cost me some fuel okay working as intended it's less fuel than you'd think honestly really yeah alternators are going to cause drag on your engine regardless even if you're not using an Eco flow to charge your battery and all these other things so you're just adding a bit more to that 430 watts of more yeah also if you leave it on and shut the car off it'll actually detect that the voltage is dropped because when your alternator is running and the engine's running it's going to be at like 14 and a half volts and when it's off probably around 12 and a half it can detect that and not draw power too yeah because if it draws power from your like lead acid battery that's used to start the car you're gonna have such a bad time whole family camping trip ruined but hold on you could plug a battery charger into your ecoflow and charge the battery back and while you're waiting for CAA you've got video games to play yeah [Laughter] uh what the okay that's why we need professionals yeah these are not the same width as the roof rackets you're probably wondering how on Earth this cable from the solar panels is going to make its way into the trunk we actually have a plan for that check this out there's a little tiny Gap in the track for the roof rail so we're going to put this under the plastic here then it'll come across here and all we got to do is put a little hole in this grommet and boom we're inside again we're going to do that once the solar panels actually go on the roof with the Professional installation so they don't go flying off like the hood of a Tesla unfortunately this is a pre-production unit so our solar charging isn't going to work yet but in part two we're going to have a production unit so we'll be able to show you all three methods of charging it I think Jake yes you were planning to show the third method now though which does work which is AC power so if you're at a campsite or something that has power or you just in your garage oh yeah charge it in your garage or something like that this is going to be the most economical way to charge it well economical and fast obviously soldiers and the cool thing about this this cable comes bare so you can terminate this thing with a 30 amp cable and charge at 120 volt 30 amp oh really wow this is just you know 15 amps so we're gonna set in the little panel 15 amp Max but you could do 30. that's pretty good 3000 Watts yeah that's a lot it would charge really fast zero volts wait is this oh this plug might be dead hold on oh is that actually plugged into anything it is but a bunch of the plugs in this building are so is it working now nope it's a really good building we bought hey no nope it says it's getting 14 watts from the alternator which can't be right oh it's much better hey there we go 119.5 volts 0.6 amps it's working on it it's taking a sec 71 Watts 150 watts let's go what's the amperage that 215. there we go set to 15 amps yeah so is it just gonna suck back that entire circuit pretty much you don't want to set that to 15 amps you want to set that to 80 percent of whatever your breaker it usually doesn't really go much higher than like 1.3 which is kind of where you want to be is that just what the voltage dropped to from this load in this building because that would be awful I wouldn't be surprised look at how fast this charge is hour and a half to do 50 more so it'll take three hours to charge on this or with a 30 amp plug would take an hour and a half so wait if you start the car oh will it go even faster yeah 1.54 kilowatts that's the uh charging time to beat let's go give her a little give her a little gas let's go two kilowatts okay which is all pretty cool but does it actually run let's give it a shot unrelated to this video but we're over here in lab two right now and you can see all the rackings in for all the like pallets upon pallets of products we're going to be testing in the coming months and years pretty exciting is this really what we're using for gaming this classic BenQ I liberated it from NCIX a long time ago oh no I already kicked on we are definitely gonna need a more elegant solution for this do we have a plan for this yeah just different monitors oh okay and they'll just mount to the back of the headrest yeah you can buy those little ones with the little hookies we used to play on a Wii in our back seat when we would go on road trips would the acceleration of the car mess with the accelerometer and the Wiimote I don't know and I feel like we didn't really play games that needed the motion aspect because you need the light bar thing for that we didn't play those games got him obviously we're gonna go with something much more modest in terms of spec and ideally something that will fit under the seats both with airflow in and exhaust out that don't somehow interfere with each other there's definitely a lot of problems to solve but for now mind you would anything prevent us from running like a Plex Media Server no locally that would be you might as well just have you should have a shield for that because that'd be the lowest power yeah we're at 145 Watts right now 250 Watts what are you doing I turned on this ancient CFL backlit monitor Jake that you guys gave me hey do we have peripherals at all can you believe rocket disabled the Sova this thing is amazing sorry did I say disabled can you believe rock at disabled can you believe rocket discontinued the Sova this thing is so cool as soon as I found out it was EOL I bought like three of them well there's nothing else quite like it you should game and I'll back it out into the parking lot I'm down we should remove the solar panels from the roof before you move the vehicle no way be a man it's okay it's only your paint though we'd scratch uh yeah oh we should remove it are we going for a gaming Drive uh what are you four foot Nothing Like Jesus look just chill okay oh okay is that a problem I mean no no uh okay just okay oh that's probably okay Jake what you said it's not a problem we've got more power than we're using but it says it's gonna take a couple days to charge because it's only by a 100 Watts or so the car is very mad the doors open uh yeah that makes sense and we never saw them again oh my God card it's fine fine we're just gaming all right we're Gamers we're Gamers hold on hold on I'm not gaming yet Jake I'm sorry I'll stop my bad Uber for gamers that would be so cool I said like third episode we gotta take this thing out as an Uber does anyone have their Uber like license I know someone the Uber driver who offered to lend us his Uber for a mock e-review I have his number cool motion blur you man this might be a little nauseating um what do you mean I just I have concerns okay I have concerns I set the alternator uh charging to 40 amps so we're we're making more juice than we're losing wow 600 watts what are you gaming I'm playing cyberpunk obviously the power truck just went way up whoa you can hear the Hub in the back you hear those fans going oh yeah oh it's not no they're not doing it anymore I guess that was just part of like a a response to a sudden heavy load or something it's also pre-production so it could be that the fan curve gets better later I can't believe this is what's happening right now I can't shoulder check that's for sure everyone on the road oh this is beyond stupid those are power draw all right I mean we're inputting 600 watts you're using about 600 watts so we're pretty much even right now this monitor is an absolute Pig like yes this computer is pretty powerful what is this RTX 4080 3080 TI 3080 TI but a lot of this power consumption is the monitor well also there's an epic in there so it's probably just drawing 280 Watts like all the time time to murder some cities crime reported you're gonna get some bumpy bumps here brace for impact I bet that car doesn't have a PC in it did a locker nerd PC is my own space heater yeah David is your ass are we concerned about cooling well you got AC it's a car yeah but that could be a lot of heat load on it I mean how many watts is a human the heat is like 100 yeah that's like five extra people yeah each of those solar panels is rated for about 100 watts and if my experience is anything to go by that means you're probably gonna get like 60 watts out of them but even so that'll take a little bit of the bite out of your power consumption for sure especially when we put the bigger alternator in and we have another 100 amps we could charge at a thousand Watts while you're driving and look I shut off the car and it automatically detected the voltage is lower and it's only pulling 10 watts how long does it say I can gain back here uh three hours three hours but you're pulling 600 watts not bad and we're only charged halfway yeah so you could have two of these rigs running for three freaking hours and those are not power optimized at all not even a little 600 watts is a lot for one gaming experience this is amazing I forgot how much heat this monitor throws from the front of it like I'm freaking warm sitting here right now I gotta get out of here you'll never catch me Kappa nope oh you died so they caught you yeah well they didn't catch me bullet caught me just like you caught the end of this video If you enjoyed it you might also enjoy the one where Jake and I mess around with the heating system at my house working great sick and get subscribed because there's gonna be a part two where this actually gets fully Decked Out monitors more computers better alternator more power goodbye

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,839,472

Keywords: LTT, Mini van, Van, Gaming, Off the grid, Solar Power, Alternator, Gaming Van, Off the grid gaming, Automobile, Linus Tech Tips, EcoFlow, Ecoflow powerkit, Gaming mini van, ultimate van, ultimate mini van

Id: JIfPIgwpJSg

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 29 2022